Reconstruction of dual tasking gait pattern in Parkinson's disease subjects using radial basis function based artificial intelligence

Abstract

Vertical Ground Reaction Force (VGRF) is a force obtained during gait cycle beneath the feet and is used to screen the severity of Parkinson's disease (PD) patient's in clinical environment. This article investigates the VGRF signals (left and right) semblance nature among PD patients and control subjects as a function of time and possibility of reconstructing dual tasking VGRF signal from normal walking VGRF signals using radial basis function (RBF) based artificial intelligence (AI). There are many traditional methods for gait analysis and these methods are purely subjective and none made semblance analysis of same subjects gait pattern in different tasking. In order to overcome the difficulties faced by PD patients, RBF based AI is proposed in this research to reconstruct the dual tasking VGRF signal from normal walking VGRF signal. 93 PD patients with mean age: 66.3 years (63% men), and 73 healthy controls with mean age: 66.3 years (55% men) datasets are used in this work. Proposed RBF network is trained on VGRF signals obtained in normal walking and dual tasking conditions from control. The network was trained with 60% of VGRF data and tested on remaining 40% data. Semblance analysis results are encouraging, and it shows that semblance is high in PD patients than control subjects during dual tasking (P < 0.05). In order to test the findings of semblance analysis, we explicitly reconstruct VGRF signal of clinically significant dual tasking from VGRF signal of normal walking by the proposed RBF method. Findings proved that the proposed RBF network can reconstruct dual tasking VGRF signal of PD patients from their normal walking VGRF signal with high cross correlation (P < 0.0001). These findings pave way for a new adjunct tool to diagnose the gait dynamics of PD patients using the proposed reconstruction method.